Xiangyu Li

Xiangyu Li (李翔宇)

Ph.D. Candidate in Information and Communication Engineering

School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology
CSC Visiting Researcher at National University of Singapore

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate (through a fast-track Master-Ph.D. program) in Information and Communication Engineering at the School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology (SCUT), where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Xiangmin Xu. Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I earned dual Bachelor's degrees in Information Engineering and Finance from SCUT, which laid a solid interdisciplinary foundation for my research.

I am currently a CSC-funded visiting researcher (Sep 2025 – Sep 2026) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), working under the supervision of Prof. Tat-Seng Chua. My research at NUS focuses on developing advanced AI systems for financial forecasting and decision-making. To date, I have published 4 first-author papers in premier venues, including WWW, EMNLP, and Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS).

My research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Financial Technology (FinTech). I am particularly passionate about building intelligent systems that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-Agent Systems for quantitative trading, financial forecasting, and explainable financial analysis. My work aims to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI techniques and practical financial applications, making sophisticated financial tools accessible to a broader audience. In addition to my research, I actively serve the academic community as a reviewer for top-tier conferences, including AAAI, KDD, and ICML.

Large Language Models Multi-Agent Systems Financial AI Quantitative Finance Reinforcement Learning

News

Publications

2026

Under Review

FinDeepForecast: A Live Multi-Agent System for Benchmarking Deep Research Agents in Financial Forecasting

Xiangyu Li, Xuan Yao, Guohao Qi, Fengbin Zhu, Kelvin J.L. Koa, Xiang Yao Ng, Ziyang Liu, Xingyu Ni, Chang Liu, Yonghui Yang, Yang Zhang, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Chao Wang, Huanbo Luan, Xiaofen Xing, Xiangmin Xu, Tat-Seng Chua, Ke-Wei Huang

Abstract

Deep Research (DR) Agents powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally shifted the paradigm for completing complex research tasks. Yet, a comprehensive and live evaluation of their forecasting performance on real-world, research-oriented tasks in high-stakes domains (e.g., finance) remains underexplored. We introduce FinDeepForecast, the first live, end-to-end multi-agent system for automatically evaluating DR agents by continuously generating research-oriented financial forecasting tasks. This system is equipped with a dual-track taxonomy, enabling the dynamic generation of recurrent and non-recurrent forecasting tasks at both corporate and macro levels. With this system, we generate FinDeepForecastBench, a weekly evaluation benchmark over a ten-week horizon, encompassing 8 global economies and 1,314 listed companies, and evaluate 13 representative methods. Extensive experiments show that, while DR agents consistently outperform strong baselines, their performance still falls short of genuine forward-looking financial reasoning. We expect the proposed FinDeepForecast system to consistently facilitate future advancements of DR agents in research-oriented financial forecasting tasks.

Knowledge-Based Systems

MMRepAgent: Explainable Stock Earnings Forecasting via Multimodal Report Agent Framework

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu, Xiangmin Xu

Abstract

Stock return forecasting plays a critical role in quantitative investment but remains challenging for ordinary investors due to the difficulty of analyzing complex financial data and unstructured news content. While large language models (LLMs) offer interactive capabilities, they often require users to possess substantial financial expertise to issue effective prompts. To address these limitations, we propose MMRepAgent, an automated system that enables retail investors to generate comprehensive financial analysis reports without manual modeling or query engineering. MMRepAgent integrates multi-source data through a modular financial toolbox consisting of four key components: a Stock Factorization Tool for structured market indicators, a News Factorization Tool for semantic event modeling via SRL and SDPG, a Return Forecasting Tool based on an extended Fama-French model incorporating news impact and temporal effects, and a Risk Assessment Tool that enhances EGARCH-based volatility modeling with event-driven dynamics. The outputs from these modules are synthesized by a large language model to produce a multi-modal report containing textual insights, predictive visualizations, and event knowledge graphs.

2025

EMNLP 2025

QuantAgents: Towards Multi-agent Financial System via Simulated Trading

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu, Xiangmin Xu

Abstract

In this paper, our objective is to develop a multi-agent financial system that incorporates simulated trading, a technique extensively utilized by financial professionals. While current LLM-based agent models demonstrate competitive performance, they still exhibit significant deviations from real-world fund companies. A critical distinction lies in the agents' reliance on "post-reflection", particularly in response to adverse outcomes, but lack a distinctly human capability: long-term prediction of future trends. Therefore, we introduce QuantAgents, a multi-agent system integrating simulated trading, to comprehensively evaluate various investment strategies and market scenarios without assuming actual risks. Specifically, QuantAgents comprises four agents: a simulated trading analyst, a risk control analyst, a market news analyst, and a manager, who collaborate through several meetings. Moreover, our system incentivizes agents to receive feedback on two fronts: performance in real-world markets and predictive accuracy in simulated trading. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework excels across all metrics, yielding an overall return of nearly 300% over the three years.

Under Review

Profit Mirage: Revisiting Information Leakage in LLM-based Financial Agents

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu, Xiangmin Xu

Abstract

LLM-based financial agents have attracted widespread excitement for their ability to trade like human experts. However, most systems exhibit a "profit mirage": dazzling back-tested returns evaporate once the model's knowledge window ends, because of the inherent information leakage in LLMs. In this paper, we systematically quantify this leakage issue across four dimensions and release FinLake-Bench, a leakage-robust evaluation benchmark. Furthermore, to mitigate this issue, we introduce FactFin, a framework that applies counterfactual perturbations to compel LLM-based agents to learn causal drivers instead of memorized outcomes. FactFin integrates four core components: Strategy Code Generator, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and Counterfactual Simulator. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses all baselines in out-of-sample generalization, delivering superior risk-adjusted performance.

WWW 2025 Oral

HedgeAgents: A Balanced-aware Multi-agent Financial Trading System

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu, Xiangmin Xu

Abstract

As automated trading gains traction in the financial market, algorithmic investment strategies are increasingly prominent. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agent-based models exhibit promising potential in real-time market analysis and trading decisions, they still experience a significant -20% loss when confronted with rapid declines or frequent fluctuations, impeding their practical application. Hence, there is an imperative to explore a more robust and resilient framework. This paper introduces an innovative multi-agent system, HedgeAgents, aimed at bolstering system robustness via "hedging" strategies. In this well-balanced system, an array of hedging agents has been tailored, where HedgeAgents consist of a central fund manager and multiple hedging experts specializing in various financial asset classes. These agents leverage LLMs' cognitive capabilities to make decisions and coordinate through three types of conferences. Benefiting from the powerful understanding of LLMs, our HedgeAgents attained a 70% annualized return and a 400% total return over a period of 3 years. Moreover, we have observed with delight that HedgeAgents can even formulate investment experience comparable to those of human experts.

2024

WWW 2024

FinReport: Explainable Stock Earnings Forecasting via News Factor Analyzing Model

Xiangyu Li, Xinjie Shen, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu

Abstract

The task of stock earnings forecasting has received considerable attention due to the demand investors in real-world scenarios. However, compared with financial institutions, it is not easy for ordinary investors to mine factors and analyze news. On the other hand, although large language models in the financial field can serve users in the form of dialogue robots, it still requires users to have financial knowledge to ask reasonable questions. To serve the user experience, we aim to build an automatic system, FinReport, for ordinary investors to collect information, analyze it, and generate reports after summarizing. Specifically, our FinReport is based on financial news announcements and a multi-factor model to ensure the professionalism of the report. The FinReport consists of three modules: news factorization module, return forecasting module, risk assessment module. The news factorization module involves understanding news information and combining it with stock factors, the return forecasting module aim to analysis the impact of news on market sentiment, and the risk assessment module is adopted to control investment risk. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have well verified the effectiveness and explainability of our proposed FinReport.

Education

Sep 2025 - Sep 2026

Visiting Researcher (CSC Scholar)

National University of Singapore

Research on AI applications in Financial Technology, supervised by Prof. Tat-Seng Chua.

Sep 2024 - Present

Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering

South China University of Technology, School of Future Technology

Combined Master's-Ph.D. program. Supervisor: Prof. Xiangmin Xu. Research focuses on FinTech and intelligent systems.

Sep 2022 - Sep 2024

M.S. in Information and Communication Engineering

South China University of Technology, School of Electronics and Information Engineering

Research on Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models. Supervisor: Prof. Xiangmin Xu.

Sep 2018 - Jun 2022

B.S. in Information Engineering & B.S. in Finance (Dual Degree)

South China University of Technology

Dual Bachelor's Degrees from School of Electronics and Information Engineering & School of Economics and Finance. Integrated technical proficiency in information engineering with comprehensive financial expertise, establishing a solid interdisciplinary foundation.

Awards & Honors

National First Prize

Third China Graduate Financial Technology Innovation Competition ("ICBC Guangzhou Cup")

Dec 2024

Presidential Scholarship

South China University of Technology

Sep 2024

Second Prize

MathorCup University Mathematical Modeling Competition, Undergraduate Group

2021

First Prize

Asia-Pacific Mathematical Contest in Modeling (APMCM), Undergraduate Group

Nov 2020

First Prize

First Greater Bay Area Financial Mathematics Modeling Competition, Undergraduate Group

2020

Second Prize (Guangdong Division)

China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM)

2020